Look What's Cooking At Microsoft Labs

stinkymountain writes "Writer John Brandon spent two days at Microsoft Research Labs in Redmond and got an inside look at some pretty interesting projects under development, including a robotic receptionist, a new type of touch screen for people with fat fingers, and an electronic table that allows multiple people to collaborate in real time. Brandon also talks about some of these research projects on this NPR podcast."

Single page edition

[Anonymous Coward]

for those that don't want to click every 4 sentences. [networkworld.com]

Summary --

[Taimat]

Microsoft Surface for a coffee table; surface for a card table; surface for a wall; surface for a small tablet; oh, and something called "visual Studio" -- that one probably won't catch on.

Re:History

[JasterBobaMereel]

So Multitouch screen software, ditto, ditto, ditto, VS upgrade, Novelty receptionist blah blah blah

Where is the innovation? All these are projects that are minor variants of things we have seen before? and other companies are doing already .... ?

Re:Summary

[clintp]

Read TFA. No, you didn't miss any of them. Thanks for the summary.

While I'm generally a fan of Microsoft products (yes, boo hiss) these are all pretty lame. Four of them are touchscreens or variants thereof.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Nothing to see here.

[philspear]

Yeah, more than half were touch screen stuff of various flavors. I guess everyone at MS bought an iphone touch and is totally in love with it.

Sidenote, the best codename was the project to develop a robotic receptionist, "Codename: Robotic Receptionist." I really wish more codenames were more accurate like that.

Operation: invade Iraq and replace Saddam's government with a puppet government in 2 weeks. That is less pompus than "Operation: Enduring freedom" or whatever was.